Tag Archives: Seasons

Here are 50 of my favorite autumn color photos taken at Balsamea, at 500 pixels wide (or tall). If you’ve followed this blog a long time, you’ve seen these before. However, most of them managed to disappear from the blog, so, for the record, here they are again.

Click on a picture to open its own page where you can post comments on it.

OR, click any of the pictures in the series (after this first one) to switch to gallery/carousel mode where you can step through them like a slide show and comment right there on any picture. They look nicer there because they are not bunched up so tightly as seen here.

Or just say stuff in the comments box at the bottom of this post, if you ever get there. Or email me for all those delish things you always love saying to me privately.

One of our early ferns (May 6) did a little lifting on its way up. Balsamea never stops entertaining us.

The leaf was gone the next day, so my camera-play had been lucky, leaving me with a souvenir of mindful woods-walking.

That’s what most of my photos from Balsamea are about: just taking time to notice what is really there. It is a fun hobby to collect souvenirs to remember things, and to remind me to keep being mindful of them. It is good medicine to mind and body.

However, sometimes I make a point of leaving the camera home, to “bathe” in the essence of the forest just for the sake of doing it, taking a lesson from my canine partner, being there just to be there, belonging there.

But Buddy has learned to pause the walk on his own when he sees the camera come out of its case.

Like this:

These little Balsameans (and Adirondack natives) have gathered here for no reason but to please The Balsamean. Maybe you’ll enjoy it, too. This is one case where clicking a picture will NOT get you a bigger view. They are just sample 100-pixel views of SOME of the kinds of spring and summer living entertainment here. (However, you can magnify with your browser or Windows features.) These pix were clipped out of bigger ones that are even more beautiful, shot over the past several years, mostly within the past few years. This show must go on, and it will. These little Balsameans will perform for as long as we let them and protect them. The display sequence is random, and will change every time you refresh the page or come back for another visit. There are about 130 of them. (All photos by yours truly at Balsamea.)

Like this:

I shot these pictures today, 12/25/2012. I have better winter pictures from February 2012, coming soon to a blog scribblement near you, but today I wanted to share pictures taken today.

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This has nothing to do with Christmas, but boy-oh-boy if you are into Christmas, in my part of the world the sky and the snow are performing just as Bing Crosby dreamed for on Christmas.

“Yo! Tannenbaum!” German Tanne (fir) + Baum (tree).

For our nightly walk this most celebrated day of the year, in a brisk thirteen degrees (no problem when walking briskly, unless into a stiff headwind, then you have nose issues, but we were in dense forest cover with NO wind tonight) we had the “perfect storm” of combined crystal-clear sky, moon nearing full, and Jupiter parked a finger’s width from the moon, yet blazing its strong light right through the moon’s white-out drowning of all other stars near it. I wondered what could be so bright? Is there a kid being born by autogenesis in a manger somewhere? Should I pack up some balsam incense and head east?

Since Rudolph’s nose isn’t white, and the light was not moving, I decided to check with StarDate, who told me it was a special presentation of Jupiter. Just the gods playing around in the sky, as ever. Orion was swashing his buckle just below the moon, also standing out against that moon-washed sky of few visible stars.

The timing was great, too. The moon was not far from apex just when we set out for the walk, around 8:10 PM. That makes the light pierce down through the trees with less shadow and more light hitting the snow.

We have a complete snow cover that developed slowly over a period of three days, totaling about four inches accumulation. With temperatures staying low, the snow is staying put, and still sticking in billows to not only the balsam fir boughs, but to the upper surfaces of many maple and beech tree branches that don’t get hit by a lot of wind and/or sun. I love the way it puts a white lining on the branches that are otherwise just sticks all winter (unless glazed in ice).